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Website thisisxbox.com is reporting that an unnamed source has told them that the next Call of Duty title from Infinity Ward will not be titled Modern Warfare 3 and will take place prior to the events in Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. Below are some of the details stated from the source.

Game will feature Ghost from MW2 and how he became a member of Task Force 141

Players will revist locations from Modern Warfare, and MW2 from a “different viewpoint”

Game will run on the Modern Warfare 2 engine

Take all of this as a rumor for now, but keep in mind this comes from the same source that correctly confirmed Black Ops prior to E3 last year.

“I think we have a number of businesses where the performance is not where we’d like it to be. We’re making some progress in those areas. But clearly not enough and not fast enough. We reset some of the product development targets, particularly on the casual and licensed part of our portfolio, so we believe we can improve the margin performance on our publishing business. We have more development resources dedicated to Call of Duty than we’ve ever had before,” – Activision Blizzard CFO Thomas Tippl

CVG speculates that Activision intends to release two or three new CoD games in 2011, one from Infinity Ward, one from Sledgehammer and an online one in China. That all sounds reasonable to me considering past statements from Kotick. In fact I would not be surprised at all if Activision did something with Call of Duty similar to EA’s recently announced Battlefield Play4Free.

“In the back-half of 2011, we’ll launch a new, large-scale Call of Duty first-person action title… The creative talent and resources that we now have devoted to the Call of Duty brand are unprecedented and given the gameplay we’ve seen to date, we could not be more excited about next year’s release.” – Activision Publishing CEO Eric Hirshberg.

“We believe Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 will be released in fiscal ’11, likely developed by Sledgehammer Games, and could sell in excess of +18 million units… [also an online-only Call of Duty game will launch in China in 2011, and an MMO game from Bungie the next financial year]” – Janco Partners’ Mike Hickey

I’m ok with the Bungie MMO (which has been hinted at by Bungie) but I don’t agree with the rest of these predictions.

If Modern Warfare development duties are going to be shifted away from Infinity Ward, Activision would most likely hand it to Treyarch. They have a deep history with the Call of Duty brand and have proven they can do the job.

As for a online-only Call of Duty in China, online only fits the market over there but it would be a far different game than what we would think of as a Call of Duty. The red commies in control of the government over there would never allow a military shooter that highlights the superiority of the US armed forces. It would never be allowed period.

“As for COD, they’ve confirmed three games in the next two years. Seeing as how there is a pattern of one new COD game every year, this is one new COD game from one new developer, and in a different genre from the core games we’ve seen.” – Activision blogger Dan Amric

Unnamed sources have told VG247 that Infinity Ward is not working on Modern Warfare 3 but is instead working on a project that is “completely new”. Speculation based on this information puts development of the game at newly formed Sledgehammer studios, a Canadian studio or that Modern Warfare 3 will not even come to pass.

I have a hard time seeing Activision drop the Modern Warfare line of games but frankly I’m much more excited to see CoD Vietnam, assuming that it even exists.